185/365 Love is in the air

In my book, this kind of light painting never gets old.

It takes me back to being a kid, being a teenager, and, let's face it, being an adult playing with sparklers on the fourth of July. With a sparkler in your hand, who can resist writing their name -- or any other choice of words -- in the air?

I've never seen someone be able to do it.

This is like the indoor, year-round version. I got my inspiration from a blog post I read this week (though I cannot for the life of me find it again). Here's the setup:

I set up my camera on my tripod, set the shutter to eight seconds, and turned the self-timer to trigger after two seconds. I picked point near where I'd be standing in front of the camera, focused, then turned it to manual focus so it would stay put.

For the writing, I stepped about five feet in front of the camera, faced it, covered a flashlight with a pink scarf, and shone the light toward the camera.

For the duration of the exposure, I wrote in the air. I didn't try to write backwards. Instead, I used the magic of Lightroom to flip the photo horizontally once I got it ready for editing.

And voila! Fun! It almost looks like a neon sign.

I want to try a lot more light painting experiments like this indoors when the weather turns cold. The possibilities are endless.

Camera: Canon 40D, 8 seconds, f/3.5 at ISO 100